Josie, I have been searching for a long time a piece that does what yours does: articulate why I both staunchly defend critics but sometimes also sense some Oz type character behind the curtain, so to speak. Thank you!
Often in literary criticism, the critic is more interested in demonstrating their writing cleverness, than in writing about the book. Why, in Book Review sections, does the critic’s name appear in larger, bolder typeface than the title of the book and the author’s name?
Emre's distinction between reading well and writing well is the thing I appreciate the most. From the other side of it, as someone writing fiction, I'd say the relationship runs differently than either position suggests. Close reading didn't teach me how to write about books. It taught me how to write books. Purely through absorption. You read enough Cusk or Didion or Ferrante and the rhythms get into your prose whether you intend it or not. The knowledge isn't propositional. It's structural. It lives in your sentences before you can name what it is. That might be closer to what Callard is reaching for with the moral question. Not what novels teach us to think but what they teach us to do with language when we sit down to make something ourselves.
Thanks for the piece; it gave me much to think about. This part here: "We look, in our free time, for what we do not have in our working lives — perhaps intrigue, or mystery, or friendship. Thus, as critics, we must begin by knowing we are writing to the vast majority of people for whom literature functions as an escape."
-Do you think there are instances where literature/art is experienced to affirm what we have? Or is it always about a certain form of absence? Would you say this is where thought is most important, as you've described thought?
I had Emre as a prof back in uni in McGill. Was excited to be in her class but it ended up being the one I learned the least from. Your gut isn't lying
Your exchange made me doubt the coherence of Emre's view, but I would like to hear more about the "hopeful gesture" you'd make about criticism and knowledge. I can't see my way through to the end of that idea.
Regarding Emre's point, when speaking about art, I'm not convinced that aesthetic value, or "beauty," actually is a free-floating attribute of an object that stands outside time, since it's so clear that different people find different things beautiful. The example of a disagreement between two critics about whether a work of art is good or not, when one critic likes the work of art and another dislikes it, is definitely criticism -- I just found it unsatisfying if that disagreement truly is the best that one can get, that there is understood to be no better mode of writing about beauty or applying careful attention to art. That's why I went in the direction of situated meaning and the attempt to understand why a particular work of art is significant in a particular time with a particular group of people as the sort of "knowledge" criticism might be able to provide. (I just took a class on Nietzsche, and the phrase about the attempt to "incorporate knowledge and truth," somehow combining self-critical practice with the vitality of that which feels true in a will-to-power way, and my attempt to try to wrap my head around this concept, is definitely in the background here).
I would be interested in venturing a claim that we have grounds to judge one work of criticism to be better than another, but I'm not sure how to make that claim while moving through the thorny ground of purpose and need. For example, I believe that an important function that criticism can perform is the way it can make legible to the reader a process of thinking or making a judgment, and I tend to believe that it would be broadly "good" for most people to think more deeply about the art, particularly popular art, with which they engage -- but then it would seem that one ought to speak and act more instrumentally when it comes to criticism than when it comes to art, attempting to have one's finger on the pulse of what particular works from whose demonstration of careful engagement a certain audience could benefit, with the desired end of changing the audience's relationship to art. The knowledge that is here, I think, would only be of the situated nature -- that one work of criticism provides a more apt appraisal of an art object than another, by the criteria I have set, which are situated in many ways in perception of present need and what the present moment demands.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, this is very helpful. I'm still curious about the "good" and the "benefit" here. I think Agnes leapt immediately to the idea of a moral good in your Night Owls exchange, but I suspect you have doubts about that? What do the alternatives look like?
The moral good that I see here is mainly in the Arendtian sense -- a public which is able to reflectively evaluate the art before them and their reactions to it seems to me better able to respond to adverse political moments like fascism. I'd also argue that robust intellectual engagement with art is a good in itself that makes one's life better, in the virtue-ethical sense, but I am not yet the most well-versed in Aristotle. I also often find the kind of art criticism which attempts to dissect the work into its component parts in order to understand its essence as a work of art to feel incomplete or just less philosophically interesting without attempting to also understand the work's function in relation to how a particular group of people actually live, how the ideas in the art might seem to grow legs and walk in the real world. In order to free art from moral standards and allow it to serve as a sort of tortured reflection of the undercurrents of the time, I might be ablet to make an argument that the demand, then, for criticism to do "good" or be aligned with the "good" involves criticism's duty of doing what art cannot by addressing the world outside of it.
So if I understand you, maybe the way in which we can make judgements between or about acts of criticism is (at least) in terms of how well-ordered they are to the goal of a more self-conscious and free (is that right?) public. Criticism will be bad to the extent that it makes incoherent attempts at some kind of analytical or scientific knowledge of art, or to the extent that it moralizes, approving or condemning without giving the public the resources to do so themselves. And then we will also want to say that criticism is (not bad but) wrong when, having the correct goals, it causes its reader to misunderstand the function or force a work of art has for that reader. This is just a shot at regurgitating your idea, to see if I have it right (and I appreciate your bearing with me).
Josie, I have been searching for a long time a piece that does what yours does: articulate why I both staunchly defend critics but sometimes also sense some Oz type character behind the curtain, so to speak. Thank you!
Often in literary criticism, the critic is more interested in demonstrating their writing cleverness, than in writing about the book. Why, in Book Review sections, does the critic’s name appear in larger, bolder typeface than the title of the book and the author’s name?
Emre's distinction between reading well and writing well is the thing I appreciate the most. From the other side of it, as someone writing fiction, I'd say the relationship runs differently than either position suggests. Close reading didn't teach me how to write about books. It taught me how to write books. Purely through absorption. You read enough Cusk or Didion or Ferrante and the rhythms get into your prose whether you intend it or not. The knowledge isn't propositional. It's structural. It lives in your sentences before you can name what it is. That might be closer to what Callard is reaching for with the moral question. Not what novels teach us to think but what they teach us to do with language when we sit down to make something ourselves.
Thanks for the piece; it gave me much to think about. This part here: "We look, in our free time, for what we do not have in our working lives — perhaps intrigue, or mystery, or friendship. Thus, as critics, we must begin by knowing we are writing to the vast majority of people for whom literature functions as an escape."
-Do you think there are instances where literature/art is experienced to affirm what we have? Or is it always about a certain form of absence? Would you say this is where thought is most important, as you've described thought?
I had Emre as a prof back in uni in McGill. Was excited to be in her class but it ended up being the one I learned the least from. Your gut isn't lying
Your exchange made me doubt the coherence of Emre's view, but I would like to hear more about the "hopeful gesture" you'd make about criticism and knowledge. I can't see my way through to the end of that idea.
Regarding Emre's point, when speaking about art, I'm not convinced that aesthetic value, or "beauty," actually is a free-floating attribute of an object that stands outside time, since it's so clear that different people find different things beautiful. The example of a disagreement between two critics about whether a work of art is good or not, when one critic likes the work of art and another dislikes it, is definitely criticism -- I just found it unsatisfying if that disagreement truly is the best that one can get, that there is understood to be no better mode of writing about beauty or applying careful attention to art. That's why I went in the direction of situated meaning and the attempt to understand why a particular work of art is significant in a particular time with a particular group of people as the sort of "knowledge" criticism might be able to provide. (I just took a class on Nietzsche, and the phrase about the attempt to "incorporate knowledge and truth," somehow combining self-critical practice with the vitality of that which feels true in a will-to-power way, and my attempt to try to wrap my head around this concept, is definitely in the background here).
I would be interested in venturing a claim that we have grounds to judge one work of criticism to be better than another, but I'm not sure how to make that claim while moving through the thorny ground of purpose and need. For example, I believe that an important function that criticism can perform is the way it can make legible to the reader a process of thinking or making a judgment, and I tend to believe that it would be broadly "good" for most people to think more deeply about the art, particularly popular art, with which they engage -- but then it would seem that one ought to speak and act more instrumentally when it comes to criticism than when it comes to art, attempting to have one's finger on the pulse of what particular works from whose demonstration of careful engagement a certain audience could benefit, with the desired end of changing the audience's relationship to art. The knowledge that is here, I think, would only be of the situated nature -- that one work of criticism provides a more apt appraisal of an art object than another, by the criteria I have set, which are situated in many ways in perception of present need and what the present moment demands.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, this is very helpful. I'm still curious about the "good" and the "benefit" here. I think Agnes leapt immediately to the idea of a moral good in your Night Owls exchange, but I suspect you have doubts about that? What do the alternatives look like?
The moral good that I see here is mainly in the Arendtian sense -- a public which is able to reflectively evaluate the art before them and their reactions to it seems to me better able to respond to adverse political moments like fascism. I'd also argue that robust intellectual engagement with art is a good in itself that makes one's life better, in the virtue-ethical sense, but I am not yet the most well-versed in Aristotle. I also often find the kind of art criticism which attempts to dissect the work into its component parts in order to understand its essence as a work of art to feel incomplete or just less philosophically interesting without attempting to also understand the work's function in relation to how a particular group of people actually live, how the ideas in the art might seem to grow legs and walk in the real world. In order to free art from moral standards and allow it to serve as a sort of tortured reflection of the undercurrents of the time, I might be ablet to make an argument that the demand, then, for criticism to do "good" or be aligned with the "good" involves criticism's duty of doing what art cannot by addressing the world outside of it.
So if I understand you, maybe the way in which we can make judgements between or about acts of criticism is (at least) in terms of how well-ordered they are to the goal of a more self-conscious and free (is that right?) public. Criticism will be bad to the extent that it makes incoherent attempts at some kind of analytical or scientific knowledge of art, or to the extent that it moralizes, approving or condemning without giving the public the resources to do so themselves. And then we will also want to say that criticism is (not bad but) wrong when, having the correct goals, it causes its reader to misunderstand the function or force a work of art has for that reader. This is just a shot at regurgitating your idea, to see if I have it right (and I appreciate your bearing with me).